Last night on the train back home I finally finished reading "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. It's beautifully written, prose that leaves a feeling you've been reading poetry, poignant plot, real characters. There's a lot more to say, a lot more, than a few sentences here can do justice for. I was happy I read it. I learned a lot about lives of slaves and the trauma they had to face long after their emancipation. But I also learned a lot about human beings, about how we behave, the capacity for good and evil in which we treat one another. The suffering most characters had to go through put my life into perspective. Even the last few pages had that effect on me.
One of the characters in those last few pages recalled finding himself in the North after the War. He was surprised he got compensated for helping a white man unload his truck of groceries. He was surprised that his compensation, coins which he never had touched before, allowed him to obtain food that no one made him wait on a whim. He was shocked that people didn't look at him like he was a fugitive. It was beautiful how Morrison made me understand what it meant to have lived in a cage. People still talk about freedom these days, freedom from tyrants, freedom to express yourself and to assemble. People in Libya are taking up arms because the bullets were coming their way from those who refuse to listen to their pleas of freedom.
But living in a cage all your life, being sold as a commodity, having absolutely no freedom at all, is worse than being a prisoner. One of the book's main themes was lost of identity. Slavery takes away not only all your freedom, absolutely all of it, not just political freedoms people are still fighting for, but your identity. Anyone trying to be different is roasted in a fire like one of the characters was.
I've been struggling with my own identity. I forgot that I have the luxury of even having it, even if I don't know what it is always. And the freedom I have is immense, especially being in the middle-class of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Money does buy you more freedom, whether the socialists like it or not. I still have the right to struggle for ending what makes me unhappy, even if the issue involved isn't as painful as loss of identity and basic freedom. I just need to put things into some perspective when I do go through my struggle.
And how is that struggle? Today is the first day of March. I noticed this fact when I took out my monthly pass. No, I didn't forget to bring the March pass. Yesterday I made sure I put it in my wallet along with the February one. Last night I threw out the February one right before bed and after my quick, warm shower. A warm shower before sleep was helpful. My life is still in a storm. A storm, true, incomparable to the daily nightmare of the characters in "Beloved", but still, a storm. I know it will subside, and with a new life, at the very least, new storms. I called a friend yesterday during work to complain about the storm. To complain more that it was always the same storm, the same pattern in my life, that I wanted to end it. End the storm, end the pattern. The next struggle deserves a different kind of storm.
And for some reason, I remembered my first serious girlfriend. I did so on my way home. Perhaps it was because I was aware of the fact that no one would be waiting for me in a warm house. There wouldn't be a smile when I walked in. It's a romantic notion most people with someone don't get very often. And I didn't get it too often either with that first girlfriend. But what I remembered wasn't an episode where I went into my dorm room and saw her smile, which happened a few times. What I remembered was an example of how a woman behaves when she was crazy about me. She and I had a very stormy relationship (apparently this current storm hasn't changed much in the past twenty years). But I remember that summer when we tried to meet in the middle of Europe. I had just finished teaching English in a village in Hungary and wanted to see her in her native city of Bucharest in the neighboring Romania. There was drama for me to get a visa to get into Romania because I still had my Chinese passport. There was anxiety about how and where to meet. Nothing too serious, but for me, for us, there was a lot of anxiety, especially me visiting a country that just came out of the darkness of Communism. What I remembered briefly as I walked toward my empty house was that she told me after we finally found each other, that she missed me a lot, that out of anxiety that we wouldn't meet up (back then communication didn't involve cell phones or Facebook), she actually wrote chalk graffiti of her contact info on the floor of the Budapest train station where where was hoping to intercept me (for those who don't know much about Eastern Europe, that's the capital of Hungary).
She thought about me. Even if we fought a lot, tried to cause immense pain and suffering on each other, she thought a lot about me, then and after. When you come home to find a smile, you know someone in this world was thinking about you. When you get a text message just letting you know someone was thinking about you, you know you aren't alone.
My struggle is not finding peace so I don't need someone to tell me they are thinking about me, to tell me I am important. That's not a struggle, that's a way of life, searching and maintaining that peace. My struggle is meeting someone who, regardless of how I am doing on my path of peace, reminds me that I am not alone, that she is thinking about me, that she wants me to have what I want, that she would give what she can because I am part of what she wants in life. It's important to distinguish this struggle, which is very painful at times, from the path of peace, which is one that makes me happy even if I rarely succeed.
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